Feature / Interviews
Die Young (TX)

Words: Michael • Posted pre-2010

Die Young (tx) are a band who have survived the American Nightmare curse of band name issues to go on to make some of the most inspiring hardcore around. Michael caught up with vocalist "The Rev. White Devil" to find out more.

Scene Point Blank: You go by The Rev. White Devil rather than your birth name, what's that all about?

The Rev. White Devil: Haha, well my real name is Daniel, just so everyone knows. Die Young (TX) is a pretty serious band, or very serious to be accurate, but we're not individuals without a sense humor. We've never put our real names in the album inserts simply because we wanted to throw people a curve ball, I guess you could say. Hopefully, all the lists of aliases in our lyric sheets convey to people that we don't take ourselves too seriously. We're still (somewhat) regular dudes, haha. "White Devil" was a nickname that came about when we made our first demo and started playing our first shows in Houston. It sounds weird to say it like this, but two non-white friends of mine thought all the anti-religious sentiment in our lyrics was really funny, and they'd just start shouting out "White Devil!" while we were on stage, and before you know it, the name just kind of caught on with local kids. To be honest, I don't hear people blurting out "White Devil" much anymore, but really it's just too late to go back and start putting our real names on our albums, haha.

Scene Point Blank: Speaking of names, last year your band had to change its name from Die Young to Die Young (TX). For those unaware, can you tell us the story behind this change?

The Rev. White Devil: Well, we got home from a tour in the summer of 2005, and I had some letters from a lawyer in southern California waiting for me in the mail. We had been ordered to "cease and desist" use of the name Die Young and pull all units/products bearing the name from the shelves of stores and distributors or else there would be legal action against us. Apparently a band from California had gone out and bought the trademark to the name, and they could prove that they had been a band slightly longer than us. To be honest, we just ignored these letters for about five months or so. I really just don't have any regard for that kind of crap, especially in the arena of supposed "punk rock". But then the lawyer started harassing our label, and my mail kept piling up, so I decided to contact the dudes from the other band myself to see if we could reach any kind of resolution on a "dude" level. Luckily, the singer of the other Die Young was a really cool and understanding guy, and we both agreed to work things out without getting the law involved any further. They actually offered to sell us the name, but they wanted more than we could afford (a LOT more haha), so he told me we could keep the name as long as we just added something else to distinguish ourselves from them in the marketplace (not that there has really ever been much confusion, if any). So we kept it simple and added the "TX" or "(TX)" instead of changing the name altogether.

We did think of changing it to something based on some song lyrics of ours, but in the end, it just didn't feel right. We felt adding the "TX" would be a better compromise - one that wouldn't compromise the reputation we had built around the name Die Young. It's really not so bad. We have an agreement in writing with the California Die Young, and it doesn't really specify how big the "TX" has to be. It's just got to be there one way or the other, and we've come to be cool with that. The whole situation really could have ended up being a lot worse than it did. In a weird sense, being that the situation in itself was a huge pain in the ass, we are still very grateful that the California Die Young was willing to work things out on a "dude" level with us.

Scene Point Blank: A couple of months back Die Young (TX) signed to Eulogy? How did that signing come about?

The Rev. White Devil: I'd say the deal with Eulogy came about for two reasons. One: we tour our asses off. Two: we have some good friends--friends who have been our friends and fans of our music since before they worked at Eulogy, who really look out for us. We actually spent a good six months wasting our time communicating with another prominent hardcore label about doing our full-length, but they couldn't quite get things together to do our record, so when that fell through we ended up getting an offer from Eulogy shortly afterwards, and so far I don't see how things could be any better for us. In retrospect, I am stoked things worked out the way they did, even though they didn't work out how we thought they were going to work out. We get to communicate directly with friends of ours who believe in our music about the way we want to be portrayed, promoted, and all that. So far, Eulogy has been very welcoming to our ideas for our music, artwork and overall vision, which, I'm sure they might consider to be fairly unconventional at times, haha. I think it's cool that we are able to balance the business end of things very casually by collaborating with our friends at the label instead of some maniacal Tony Brummel type that we have no history with.

Scene Point Blank: You've titled your upcoming full-length, Graven Images. What does that title mean? How will it be reflected in the music found on the record? When can we expect the album to be released?

The Rev. White Devil: I don't want to give away too much about the new album and all the ideas behind it, because I really want everyone to have a chance to think about what it's supposed to mean for themselves when it comes out. That's really the most important thing about the whole album - to think about it. Basically though, Graven Images is a biblical reference, and the album as a whole is generally an assault on the hypocrisy of western religion and government, and western civilization as a whole, honestly. It's by far our most concentrated work, and our most experimental. I wouldn't do another record if it wasn't our strongest effort, and if it wasn't striving for something new, both musically and in the concepts it touches upon. I think we might actually lose some people with this one. This is bound to be a record people will either hate or love, as it's the most extreme Die Young (TX) has ever been with its message and ideals. We're recording the album in November, and it is scheduled to be out in early March of 2007.

Scene Point Blank: One thing that I have noticed is that Die Young (TX) is always on tour, and its not just tours of the United States. You guys have played places like Alaska, Eastern Asia, and even islands in the Caribbean. Why go through all the trouble of playing such obscure locations?

The Rev. White Devil: Why would anyone not want to go to Puerto Rico and swim under waterfalls in the rainforest? or look down the side of a volcano above the clouds in Costa Rica? or feed wild monkeys on mountain overlooking the Gulf of Thailand? We've seen some of the most beautiful, captivating, and amazing places in the world just by playing in this band (the band actually made it affordable to see all those great places), and we've met some of the most welcoming and enthusiastic hardcore kids in the process. We have learned a lot about other customs and people, too, and with every new place we are privileged enough to visit I think we are all wiser human beings. Hardcore kids in other, less wealthy countries aren't as spoiled and jaded as most North American crowds - kids actually come up front! The shows are almost always the most memorable when you've got to fly across an ocean to play. It just means so much to be there - both to yourself and to the kids who come out.

Also, I will say there is a big difference when you go some place as a tourist, and you stay in some resort, and you are detached from the local people than when you go some place where you are bringing something that people want besides your tourist dollars and you get to stay in local kids' houses and talk to their families and see their homeland from their perspective. I find traveling to be a bit more interesting that way, because you get to be more connected with the place and the culture, and I'm very thankful that hardcore/punk has given me the opportunity to see things from that perspective. We've been able to experience how this music and lifestyle brings people from all over the world together and builds community without borders. It's really no trouble at all. It's a total privilege, and I would hope more hardcore/punk kids would utilize this global community and connect with people in far off places, and then hopefully go see those places! There's so much out there to open our eyes.

This band is about experiences, and as long as we're playing music, we're going to get out to every new place we possibly can. And you know, it's a really cool thing to possibly be the band that introduced hardcore to some kids in Alaska or Taiwan, or some other place where most US hardcore acts NEVER go. I just don't understand why some bands wouldn't want to go see some of the places we've been to. I understand that financing it all can be a toilsome task, but still, it just doesn't add up to miss out on so many great places.

Scene Point Blank: During your travels in Asia, I heard you had an interesting run in with customs over your CDs. What was that all about?

The Rev. White Devil: We had heard stories of how "black metal" was illegal in Malaysia prior to our visit there, but we arrived in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to find out that just about any material encompassing rock and roll is pretty much considered to be black metal. You see, black metal is illegal there, but I don't think any of the authorities even really know what black metal is. Anyway, we arrive in Kuala Lumpur, get our bags and split up to go through the customs lines. Everyone makes it through but me, and the woman officer searching my bags asks me if all the CDs I am carrying are "black metal." I say "no, punk rock, hardcore." She goes to get a higher-ranking officer and they take me back to an office to interrogate me further. They spilled out two bags of mine on a table and various officers would periodically come into the room, scatter it about, and exclaim "Black metal! Black metal! Prohibited!" Eventually I was told I could leave my contraband there, at the airport, until we were to fly out two days later, and I could come back with a receipt and pick up my items then. Luckily, they did give me my stuff back then. Too bad I lost two whole hours of my life sitting there in utter confusion while the dudes in the band were waiting outside in the Malaysian heat without a clue of what was happening to me. Haha, good times, at least it makes for a funny story. That was really the only major culture clash of our whole three-week East Asia tour though.

Scene Point Blank: You hear bands called this all the time, but if ever a band ever really deserved the title of "hardest working band in hardcore," I think it would be you guys. What are your thoughts on bands that do little touring, if at all, and survive off of Internet hype?

The Rev. White Devil: To be honest, I think a lot of kids out there like a lot of insincere and contrived garbage, but that's just my opinion. I don't think hardcore bands have to be "hard-working," so long as they are at least honest about who they are. Bands don't always have to be touring machines. Sure, I do think struggling is a very essential part of hardcore, and I am flattered that people do quite often say that we are the most hard-working band, or whatever, but you know, hardcore can be whatever you want it to be. It can just be fun and simple. If other people catch on to it and go nuts about your fun and simple band then good for you and your band. Die Young (TX) does things the way we do them because that's just how we want to live. We don't want to be at home working. We want to be on the road, doing new things, seeing new places, chillin' with new people, looting as much as we can. We don't even have to make much money at all to live this way. Every day is a new continental breakfast at a hotel we didn't pay for, or a new unsuspecting grocery store. We're provided for, haha. It's a busy life, but it's also a very simple life--there's time to read, talk to your friends, explore and basically just do all the things we love to do. As hard as people think we work as a band, we don't exactly do it to "get ahead" or be the "biggest band", or whatever-the-fuck. We're just actively trying to build lives we actually want to live, rather than sell them away by the hour--that's just not for us. I'm definitely more concerned with how deeply people are connected with our music and message than how many records we're actually selling.

Scene Point Blank: A lot of the lyrical content for your songs seems to draw from philosophical writings as opposed to the typical lyrical content that draws from the events of ordinary life. How important are sociological and philosophical issues to hardcore? To many hardcore is about moshing and singing-along, not the message. Your thoughts?

The Rev. White Devil: As I said before, I don't think hardcore has got to be like Die Young (TX) makes it - it doesn't always have to be serious and socio-political. But on the other side of the coin, there's a severe lack of bands pushing the envelope intellectually these days, and maybe there always has been. I know hardcore wasn't started by brainiacs at Ivy League schools, but I wouldn't call Minor Threat a band that was composed of meatheads either. So yeah, hardcore and punk were started by pissed off urban youth who were just plain fucking pissed about just about everything whether they could really articulate their rage well or not. Here we are nearly thirty years later, and I sincerely hope a fair lot of us involved in this community would have learned actually know what we're all so pissed off about. We've had time to evolve, you know? So much of the rage you see in hardcore these days is so misguided and self-defeating. I'm not entertaining some delusion here that we, as a minority of adolescents and young rebels, are actually going to "change the world."

In many senses, I hope the world as it is burns straight to fucking ground, but if any of us are really going to do change things, or attempt to, we will only be successful, or stand a slight chance at being successful, if we move beyond this music and this community and try to reach the masses. And I definitely think hardcore/punk can be a great starting point for that, too, strictly because of the progressive and rebellious aspects of it. Skeptics may ask, "If we don't have some concern about doing just that then why involve bigger issues in hardcore?" For me, personally, it is like this: you don't have to be a scholar or university student (I'm certainly not either of the two) to address more sociological type topics, or just realize plain and simple who or what the cause of all your rage is. Is it the silly kid at the show with the haircut you don't like? If it is, I actually feel kind of sorry for you. Or is it the system which breeds rage day in and day out--the schools which teach us lies and raise us to spend the rest of our lives working, the dead end jobs where we are treated as less than our bosses and have to sell away the hours of our lives to compete for the better living wage? And what about the governments who lie and manipulate the masses, and the economic system that caters to the ruling class alone and upholds their power over most of us? I guess the point I'm getting at here is that there's a lot more to be pissed at in the world today, in Hardcore today especially, than stupid scene drama.

What goes on in this scene is really insignificant. There are people being killed throughout the world in the name of the America, and in turn people in other parts of the world want to see all of us fucking dead, and plenty of kids in the "scene" these days would rather hear the same bullshit about backstabbers at shows than focus on things that are eventually going to affect all of us. I guess that's their prerogative, but I think that's a sort of denial. I always felt hardcore was about confrontation, not denial. The only thing we ought to be denying here is authority, if you ask me, but we should definitely be denying authority through confrontation. Philosophical ideas and sociological topics, as unpopular as they may be, have always got to have some kind of voice in hardcore/punk because they are part of our human experience and the awful realities this music was meant to be a release from. To deny those issues is to deny the reality of the lives we live. We are all affected by politics, by economics, by religion, and so forth, whether we like it or not.

Scene Point Blank: You cite artists like Catharsis and Integrity as major influences. What is it about these artists that had such a profound affect on you?

The Rev. White Devil: I think Integrity has been a major influence for just about every hardcore band in the past 15 years (including Catharsis) that has been incorporating metal elements into hardcore. Certainly, that has created a LOT of dogshit, but Integrity up until the 2000 stuff always blended the two perfectly if you ask me. I got Humanity is the Devil when I was like 15, and to be honest, it was over my head. It took me a few years to kind of grow into really understanding the concepts behind the music and appreciate them. I always dug the music and felt the rage of it, but it took some traumatic times in my high school years for me to really latch on to Dwid's lunacy. I have always loved the imagery in Integrity's artwork, too. I know a lot of people aren't fans of hardcore being a sort of art form like other styles of music, but I think it's great, and Integrity was definitely one of the premier bands that brought those artistic elements to hardcore music.

Even though I'm an atheist, Catharsis has always been a sort of religious experience for me. That band represented a completely new vision of life for me at a very pivotal time in my life when I was kind of at the fork in the road of following my dreams or falling into line with school and work and all that. Brian's lyrics have always been purely inspirational, and I think they are possibly some of the best lyrics I've ever read for any kind of music. I love the brave idealism and apocalyptic urge that Catharsis embodied, and I've done my best thus far to carry that torch with Die Young (TX). I also am in love with the fact that those kids sacrificed virtually everything to be in their band for 8 years, and practically killed themselves to keep it going and make some of the best Hardcore records ever. That's passion. I think Catharsis belongs in the same category of bands as Black Flag, because they really did make their band their entire lives, and I think that's why their music will continue to reach people for years and years--it was way more than music. It's just a shame more kids never knew and still don't know about them. Honestly, if it wasn't for Catharsis, Die Young (TX) might not exist. It definitely wouldn't be what it is.

Scene Point Blank: You also seem to be a huge fan of philosophers like Noam Chomsky and Friedrich Nietzsche. Why them?

The Rev. White Devil: Nietzsche and Chomsky are kind of household names when it comes to either linguistics and American politics, or Western philosophy. They are/were both brilliant for sure, and I generally agree with much of what they have to say (though there are plenty of exceptions, of course) but they are not the only philosophers I read by any means. We dropped their names on the Survival Instinct advertisements just to arouse interest of hardcore kids who may actually be seeking a bit more lyrical substance than they might be getting from the average fair these days.

Scene Point Blank: On your last EP, Survival Instinct, you guys covered the song "For the Kids" by Trial. Why did you choose to cover that particular song? Are there any other songs that you would like to cover in the future?

The Rev. White Devil: Trial is a very important band for us due to their lyrics alone, and I generally feel they were overlooked in their time. We covered "For the Kids" to try and keep the spirit of Trial and bands like Trial (who valued "message" as much as, or more so than music) alive for at least another generation of hardcore kids. Trial was definitely among the first bands that I ever got into that took hardcore and straightedge ideals to a higher level - one of a social and political statement of rebellion, rather than just being a clique for kids who want to be clean. I will always cherish that band for introducing me to so many new ideas when I was a sixteen-year-old kid. As for covers in the future, I don't know, we've done quite a few lately. It's probably time for us to chill on covers for a while.

Scene Point Blank: In addition to the upcoming full-length, you've also got a split 7" with Invade coming out on Double or Nothing Records. How did you team up with them? What songs are going to be on there? You also recorded an Integrity cover - what song did you choose to record and why?

The Rev. White Devil: Double or Nothing is run by the same friends of ours who help run Eulogy, and we needed to do a sort of teaser release for the new full length due to some objectionable material that Eulogy didn't want us to include on the full length. So Double or Nothing offered to let us release said material on vinyl so that we could help Eulogy avoid potential legal headaches and we could still have our fun, too. I'd elaborate more, but I really shouldn't, haha. Just pick up the release when it comes out around New Year 2007, and you should be able to figure out what I'm talking about. We're stoked to do the split with Invade because they are an intensely message-oriented band from New York. We don't really know them, but we have known about them as a band for a while so we asked them to do the split, and luckily enough for us, they were down. And of course, we did "ATF Assault" for the soon to be released Integrity tribute on your label, Mike. We decided to do "ATF Assault" because it is James Nealy's favorite Integrity song, but he's not in the band anymore, and he didn't even play the guitar tracks for the recording (I did), so yeah...it's still a rad song and it's about the Branch-Davidian Compound/David Koresh catastrophe that happened in Waco, Texas, back in the early 90s. Hey, we're from Texas, why not?

Scene Point Blank: In addition to your duties as a vocalist you also run your own record label. What is the current state of True Destiny Records? Do you have any new releases in the works?

The Rev. White Devil: True Destiny is a dead label, my friend. Thanks to Die Young (TX) consuming all my time and causing me to live without an income, and most of the True Destiny bands breaking up, I just had to give up on the label thing. I've got plenty of CDs in my closet if anybody wants them. I've got a whole lot of fucking debt, too. I advise anyone who wants to put out hardcore records to keep their day jobs, because reproducing and trying to sell the damn things alone will suck you dry financially, and it takes a lot more time to do it right than I had expected. It'd probably be a different story with True Destiny Records if I wasn't in Die Young (TX) or if we were just a weekend warrior type band, but we're not.

Scene Point Blank: You also started your own print zine. What makes this print zine unique when compared to the hundreds of others out there? What can we expect in the next issue?

The Rev. White Devil: I'd like to be working on another zine right now, but preparing for the new album has been taking up all my time. I have only done one issue so far, but hopefully I'll have another one out by the New Year. Anyway, my zine is predictably called â??The Messageâ? and I suppose it is different from most other zines in that it is strictly about punk and hardcore from a social/political perspective. There are not any reviews so far, and there's not really anything about the scene. I chose to interview bands who I felt were significant for their ethics and beliefs rather than because they are "all the buzz" or whatever. I do include my own personal writing about various subjects, so if anyone is into Die Young (TX)'s lyrics and message, I'd say you'd generally be into what the zine is. It's basically Die Young (TX) but in more of an essay form. The next issue will be much of the same subject matter, just different bands/people to be interviewed. I've got a formula and I plan to stick with it!

Scene Point Blank: Since you've literally traveled the world with Die Young (TX), are there any particular bands, zines, philosophers that you've come across would suggest to our readers to seek out that they might be unaware of?

The Rev. White Devil: To say particularly would be a long, long, long reply. When it comes to music, I hope that North American kids realize that good hardcore/punk music doesn't just come from the US. There are great bands all throughout all the places we've been to: Central America, Puerto Rico, Eastern Asia, and kids in those places have even turned us onto bands in South America. A lot of these bands are never going to have recording budgets or good equipment due to their economic circumstances, but the commonality between most all of them is that you can feel the heart and emotion they put into the music. If there's one thing regarding punk music that traveling in Die Young (TX) has shown me, it's that hardcore and punk are more vitally universal than most of us can even begin to imagine. As for writers/philosophers that kids on tour have turned me on to, one that I have been reading a lot lately who I feel is an extremely important voice is Derrick Jensen. He's an American, and he's alive right now, but his ideas are very compelling, and I think they are going to be talked about for a long time to come.

Scene Point Blank: What does the future for Die Young (TX) look like?

The Rev. White Devil: It looks like one giant blur of circle pits and stripes in the road whizzing by. Can't wait!

 


Words: Michael

Graphics: Matt

Photography by John Campbell.

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